The legacy $ENC encryption implementation has been deprecated and replaced with an enhanced version that uses a custom encryption key for each platform server. While the $ENC string notation remains in place, the underlying encryption mechanism now depends on a server-specific custom encryption key rather than the previous global encryption key.
This change may introduce differences between environments and affect:
If you are upgrading to Platform 6.0 or newer, read Migration of encrypted secrets in the Platform 6 upgrade guide before upgrading. Strings currently encrypted using $ENC will not work out-of-the-box after an upgrade to Platform 6, so it is important to know how to migrate and define your encryption keys in the Platform 6 configuration prior to platform start.